The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  I finally said, “Ah.” She rarely had to do more than hoist a cardboard sign and beat on the congas for five or ten minutes before I understood these signals. Our child had been grown and away long enough for me to have forgotten the need in a household for an alternative language. I passed her the sports section of the Times and pretended that I was reading the editorials.

  Kevin said, “This is so nice.”

  I looked over the News of the Week in Review section to watch a giant tear glide out of each eye and down. It was like seeing a toddler in sorrow.

  Jillie said, “Kevin, sweetheart. What? Are you homesick?”

  He watched her alertly, as if she’d offered a clue. He thought. Then he said, “No, Aunt Gillian. No. We did this when I was a little boy. Remember? Breakfast? Newspapers. Cake. Everybody was happy.”

  “But it isn’t happy at home,” Jillie said.

  “No more. Dad gets mad. He goes away too much. Mommy does too. I stay with Martha. I go out on Cheyne Walk. I buy things for Martha. I go home. I watch the telly. It’s boring! Mostly, it’s quite terribly sad.”

  The last five words came out in a voice that wasn’t his. I imagined we were hearing Martha’s intonations. He moved his neck as though his collar was tight. He scrubbed at his face with his cupped hands.

  “All right, then, Kevin?” Jillie looked up. I had spoken in a kind of echo of the London I heard in his voice.

  “Medicine,” he said. He smiled, as though divulging something lovely. His beautiful eyes were bright and moist. “I take tablets twice a day.” He opened a small gold pill box and removed something smaller than an aspirin, and white. “Once in the morning and once at night, and Bob’s your uncle.” He pointed at me. “And he is! Bob is my uncle!”

  So what we had here was a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boy who was, from time to time, about six years old, I thought. He was built like a goalie for Manchester United and he had been tied to the ground, like Gulliver, but by medicine instead of rope. And he fancied his Aunt Gillian in some fairly obvious ways. He had fled to us, or fled from them, and here he was, a young man charged with the energy of mission, of errand, a radiated electric sense that you might as well call purpose. He seemed to me a messenger who tarried, who chatted, who relished our anticipation of what he had come to say. But he didn’t, or he wouldn’t, or he couldn’t, say it. We were waiting, and so, perhaps, was he. Or maybe it was the medicine, or what the medicine held in check.

  Gillian asked him if he felt well, and he told her of his stomach troubles on the flight. He proved how well he now felt by eating a large bite of coffee cake. I read in the Travel section that a dollar bought .60 of a pound. I tried to calculate what that meant a pound would cost and, when I arrived at something like twenty-four dollars, I knew what I was going to do. I waggled a finger at Jillie, which meant I’d return in a minute, and, in the extra first-floor bedroom that we shared as an office, I worked out what time it was in London. My answer seemed to be thirteen dollars, so I told the phone to hell with it and dialed the international code. After the hiss and the charge of static, I heard the double ring of an English phone. It went on and on. I thought I felt like Arthur, calling home of an afternoon and wondering why my wife wasn’t there to answer.

  Kevin was at the sink with Jillie, leaning into her a little as they scraped and washed and dried.

  I said, with the tact that won me to the hearts of deponents and courtroom adversaries, “Are you staying long in America, Kevin?”

  He turned to me, smiled his smile, shrugged, then turned away and leaned back in against Jillie. He shrugged again. Jillie shrugged, as if in response, but she was signaling me. It meant: Who knows what we’ve got here? Wait awhile and see.

  I went back to our office and dialed the call again. Thinking as Arthur, I insisted to myself, I wondered what I hadn’t for years and years: Where are you now? Whom are you with? What do you feel? And, like Kevin, I was gripped in the stomach, seized that is in the ganglion there, thinking with my belly and probably my balls. Feeling, finally, like no one but me, like a lover gone into the past, I was wounded as I hadn’t been for years by the thousands and thousands of miles between upstate New York and the Chelsea Embankment. The telephone chimed the distance. I could feel the hugeness of the surface of the sea between Block Island and Margate. And then the ancient but familiar furtiveness returned, so I hung up.

  Kevin, in the kitchen, said, “Bob! Where’d you go?”

  “Back there.” I pointed with my thumb.

  “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Boring, huh?”

  “Kevin, you’re not boring. Aunt Gillian isn’t boring.”

  “So you must be!”

  I said, “Exactly.”

  In his English voice, he told Jillie, “Bang on right, isn’t he?”

  She said, “Kevin, in all the years I’ve spent with this man, and some of them have been lollapaloozas, he has never been boring.”

  “Lol—”

  “Lollapaloozas.”

  “What’s that, Aunt Gillian?”

  “It means he is a heavy-duty, full-time, nonstop job.”

  Kevin looked as though he might glow. “She really likes you, Uncle Bob.”

  I said, “I hope so.”

  Kevin gestured at the kitchen or at us. “I’m never going home,” he said.

  Years before, not long after London, our daughter, Tasha, had told me, “Whenever you lie, Daddy, I know it from your face. You catch yourself. You hear your own lies. I think you hate them or something, because you always look disgusted with yourself.”

  I’d told her, “No, I can always hedge on the facts, a little, when I’m arguing in court. It’s a professional necessity. And I was even a pretty good cardplayer in the Army.”

  “Well, sure,” she’d said, looking like Gillian’s younger sister, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, a fine swimmer, a ferret of fathers. “That’s easy, lying to judges and juries and clients and shady lawyers.”

  “You left out hit men and child molesters.”

  “But with us,” she said, “ha! You’re hopeless with us.”

  Jillie, all those years later, said to Kevin in our kitchen, “You stay as long as you like.” She sounded like she meant it.

  She was coaching me, and I caught the hint. “As long as you like,” I said. It sounded to me like a lie.

  “I LOOKED IT UP in the big dictionary, and it means you were court-martialed,” I said. “Given a dishonorable discharge.”

  “It means safe,” Jillie whispered directly into my ear in bed that night. We were acting like children, I thought, or like a man and woman sneaking some time together in bed. “Bob means safe, it’s an old-time English expression. I read it somewhere. I don’t remember. Dickens? Thomas Hardy? Arnold Bennett?”

  “The turncoat? You’d take his word? It means turncoat, maybe.”

  “No, that’s Benedict Arnold.” The effect of all this whispering was reminiscent of high school, the wet tongues of girls, the hard, waxy ears of their boyfriends. Her voice, hushing and warm in my ear, was making itself felt on the soles of my feet. They actually tingled. As if a wave of sensation bounced, then, back up through my body, my penis went heavy and hard, and I laid it against her thigh. “Good grief,” she said, “I’ll keep naming them, if I can remember any more. Oliver Goldsmith. George Gissing. Thackeray, oh, yum.”

  “So the kid’s saying to me, Safe as Uncles?”

  “He’s saying everything’s okay. All’s well. He’s using a piece of old-fashioned slang he heard from his nanny or housekeeper or whatever this Martha person is because she’s the only one who hangs around with him now and because he’s scared. He’s like a child, Bob. He’s like that dear little boy he was when they used to bring him here.”

  “When Deborah used to bring him here. Arthur dropped her off and picked her up because he was too busy in the gadget trade and because we were boring.”

  “I never cared. She
was my friend,” Jillie said. “I loved her.”

  “I used to think you, you know—”

  “What?”

  “I used to think the two of you—you know.”

  “Friends?”

  “Lesbian?”

  “Bob. You sound jealous.”

  “You know me. I probably was. And there’s nothing wrong with—loving each other. However you did it.”

  “Really?”

  I was halfway on top of her now, and my hand was in her pajamas. “I hope I believe it. Would you tell me?”

  “What, exactly?”

  “If you and she—”

  “Deborah.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “Yes?”

  “I mean, yes, I would tell you. But no. We loved each other. We were real friends. Real friends. I think that’s why I’m all over Kevin. I miss her really a lot. I hurt with missing her when I let myself get into it. Sink down into thinking about it.”

  My hand was on her stomach, edging down, and she reached in the dark and took hold of my wrist, pushing. The curtains belly in the waking room. I said, “Belly,” working down with her, our hands moving together from her belly and together on her groin and then our fingers, pressed together, inside her, moving. We were breathing in unison, and the tone of our breathing deepened, but it was still a kind of whisper, a conversation.

  Deborah had pointed out the poem for me not only because there had been a heavy white curtain that bellied in the window of the hotel in Marlow. She was also, as the four of us sat together and as Kevin played with a metal reproduction tractor I had bought him, reminding me that I had kneeled before her in the room, beside the bed, and had reached beneath her skirt to take down her pantyhose and underpants and then had climbed up inside the tent of her skirt head-first, kissing her thighs that felt cool to my lips, and working around her groin, biting on her stomach, growling, “Belly,” which had made her shriek laughter, as if she were terribly ticklish.

  “Idiot,” she’d told me, her hand on my head through the skirt. “You’re doing Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. God. Coo-kie. Idiot Bob.”

  “Belly,” I snarled into her, forcing my face where little force was required as she spread her legs to my mouth and fell back on the bed. “Belly,” I said, below it.

  Jillie was bucking up at our hands, at our fingers, saying, “Bobby, come on,” pulling me onto her, replacing our hands with me, filling herself with me as I loved her and cheated again with her friend.

  JILLIE CALLED IN, telling them she was away for the day. She was a partner in a letterpress printing company that sold old-fashioned-looking letterhead to the publishers and antiques dealers and artists who lived in our section of Dutchess Country, a hundred miles north of New York. I was going to spend the day in the office working on a suit involving an Ethiopian national whose French-owned airplane had fallen into the Mediterranean. I was suing on behalf of the dead man’s sister, who had become an American citizen. Jurisdiction wasn’t undecipherable, but it was complicated, and I was going to be phoning and faxing all day. But I was also, I told Jillie, going to be worried about her at home with Kevin.

  I was leaning over my coffee cup, whispering again, and resenting my need to be secret at home. Although, I reminded myself, I had surely been secret enough before and for a long time. “What if he gets violent?” I roared in a hush. “Didn’t he used to get that way when he was a boy? A little boy?”

  Jillie said, in less of a whisper than would have made me comfortable, “He got frightened. He got apprehensive. And he’s my dear friend’s child.”

  “Your dear friend who hasn’t written or called in how long?”

  “Well, she’s going through some things.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” Jillie rarely sounded stern. I think she learned impatience and cruelty from me. And when she spoke like an angry me to me, I found myself, always, quailed.

  “Quelled and quailed,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “The way your eyes get big and your brows go up and your voice gets brittle and mean and your cheeks get pale. You look like a killer.”

  She nodded, sipped at her coffee, said, “Don’t you forget it,” and sipped again.

  “But call me,” I said. “If there’s anything. You call me.”

  “And you will ride upstate in a couple of hours, once you get free of the office and out of midtown traffic and off the Henry Hudson Parkway and through the Hawthorne Circle and up the Taconic, and you will rescue me.”

  I said, “Damned right.”

  “You’re a dope, Bob.”

  “Damned right,” I said

  “A middle-aged dope with delusions of heroism.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “A middle-aged dope with a wife at home alone with a—with a troubled boy.”

  “Man, nearly.”

  “Jesus, Jillie. You never called Tasha a woman until she was a junior in college.”

  “It never upset you whether I did or not.”

  “And this does, so you’re doing it?”

  She nodded.

  “You are really pissed off.”

  She nodded again.

  “I could have sworn we were crazy and all over each other last night.”

  She nodded.

  “And that makes you mad?”

  She said, “In a way.” Then: “No.” She shook her head. She took an enormous breath. She said, “This is something to forget. To never mind. I am not pissed off. We did have a good time. You know that. I’m thinking, though, we’re rolling around in the rack and Debbie’s crazy in England and it doesn’t seem fair.” She took another long breath.

  “You’ll hyperventilate,” I said. “It doesn’t seem fair for you to—could I say enjoy? For you to enjoy your marriage? And I suspect she is rolling around. In somebody’s rack.”

  “If I hyperventilated and fell out of my chair and cracked my head on the floor and died, well-fucked, then that would seem to be a reasonable exchange and fair to Debbie. As for her sex life, don’t make the mistake of thinking a random screw, or a whole matched set of them, is any substitute for, I don’t know—for being happy a little.” She watched me. She nodded her head very hard. “Really,” she said. “Anything else, and you’re dreaming.”

  At the office, I punched numbers on the phone. I called Deborah and hung up. I called Jillie and disconnected before it could ring. I called Tasha, who was teaching medieval history at the University of Texas in Austin. Her answering machine had no message, only a long pause and then a suddenly burped tone to prompt the speaker, but the caller needed to hear his kid’s voice more than tell her anything, so he hung up. I telephoned the retired appellate court judge who was of counsel to the firm handling Air France matters in the States and soon enough was doing the equivalent of starting to try to untie a very tight knot made of soft, wet wool.

  The judge and I hung up, issuing the phony quacks of business bonhomie. The telephone rang at once and my secretary, Ms. Seidman, who detested me and all lawyers—everyone, in fact, except the performance artist who pierced his body as part of his art with whom she lived in apparently something of a state of excitation—announced that my wife was on the line.

  This time, she was the whisperer. I said, “I can’t hear you, Jillie. Is it Kevin?”

  She said, very low and muffled, as if her hand was over her lips and the telephone, “He’s talking to himself.”

  “In a menacing way?”

  “No, no. It’s—it’s upsetting. He’s so worried.”

  “He’s worried. He’s in trouble. That’s who talks to themselves, people in trouble. Is there any reason to think he’s going to act out?”

  “Bob, you don’t know what in hell act out means.”

  “No, but I hear it a lot. Do you notice how you’re always correcting my words, these days? Jillie: you think—I’m asking this, I guess—do you think he’s going to do anything physical to express what�
�s on his mind?”

  “That is what it means.”

  “Jillie, for Christ’s sake, you’re home alone with a kid the size of a goddamned fullback who is at least immature and somewhat retarded and worried and frightened and more than likely he’s a hell of a lot more screwed up than either of us thought, and you’re teaching me. Are you—never mind. I’m coming home.”

  “You can’t come home. You have to get rich people out of their responsibilities and obligations, don’t you?”

  “You’re hunting for my head, Jillie.”

  “For your belly.”

  “My belly?”

  In Cookie Monster’s voice, she said, “Belly.”

  “Stay near the door or something,” I said. “Go out to Millerton and hang around in crowds.”

  “Where do they keep them, again, in Millerton?”

  I said, “Shit. Goddamn it. Jillie. Take care. I’m coming home.”

  “Oh, boy,” she said.

  In the elevator I thought it, and in the car I said it to myself: “She telephoned you. She picked up the phone and she called you.” Going uptown and west, I said, “And now you’re talking to yourself like Kevin, aren’t you?” I was doing sixty-five on the Henry Hudson, ignoring the rearview mirror and, frankly, anything to either side. I wasn’t driving the car, I was aiming it. I remembered telling clients in ticklish cases to keep their silence. People, you see them and observe their behavior, and you think: nobody talks to anyone. But you’re wrong. They do. Whenever you think they can’t, or they won’t, then they do. I thought about Jillie and Deborah. Oh, they do, I thought. I said, in a singsong, “She called Kevin’s mom-my.” Then I said, “Cookie Monster’s gonna eat up all of your ass.”

  I stopped at one of the little places on Route 82 and bought hot dogs and rolls and sodas and a box of chocolate chip cookies. I went seventy miles an hour until I got to our driveway, up which I let the car waddle casually, uncle fellow, daddy guy, coming home with snacks and not a tad concerned about the safety of his wife or the menace of her recently discovered rage.

  Kevin was outside, splitting kindling. He wore his olive slacks and basket-weave loafers and his cream-and-olive shirt. I watched his back and arms as he swung the ax, and I remembered seeing them, but smaller, and bare, brown in the summer sun, when Deborah and he had come to stay for a week. I had taken him out to our shed and showed him how to split wood. Maybe he was six or seven, broad-backed and strong, and his coordination had been excellent. Once he saw how to stand the chunks upright on the chopping block and swing without fear, letting the momentum of the head of the ax do the work, he became good at it. He was good at it now. As I got out of the car, I heard him grunt as he swung, just as he had a dozen years before. In a way, he was the same boy.